Critical Discourse Analysis #

What this framework does #

Examines how linguistic choices construct social reality, distribute agency, and naturalize ideologies. These prompts treat texts as sites where power is juggled; strategic constructions that advance certain interests while marginalizing others. The goal is denaturalization: making visible the linguistic work that presents contested arrangements as inevitable, historical choices as natural forces, and structural problems as personal failings.

Why it matters #

When a text says "mistakes were made" instead of "the CEO made mistakes," or frames policy as inevitable rather than contested, it's doing ideological work. But the stakes go deeper than identifying bias. When discourse reifies social relations into "natural" forces (like "the market demands"), erases histories of struggle (treating current arrangements as eternal), or individualizes structural problems (framing unemployment as a "skills gap"), it prevents people from recognizing shared interests, imagining alternatives, or organizing collectively. These prompts are designed to “make” that mystification more visible.

Two approaches, different endpoints #

Both versions aim to perform a rigorous Critical Discourse Analysis, but they differ in their theoretical depth and political commitment.

The Softer Prompt (Methodological CDA) #

Grounded in Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and communication theory, this version audits systematic linguistic patterns:

• Transitivity analysis: Who does what to whom? How is agency distributed?
• Lexical choice: Which words carry ideological weight? What values do they naturalize?
• Positioning: How are participants positioned in power relations?

The output is descriptive and explanatory—it reveals how discourse constructs reality without requiring imagination of alternatives. The tone is forensic, the stance scholarly. Endpoint: Understanding how power operates through language.

The Interventionist Prompt (Structural Critique CDA) #

Builds on the methodological foundation but adds Critical Theory (Adorno, Marcuse) and psychoanalytic Marxism (Jacoby). This version includes everything from the softer prompt plus a fifth analytical lens:

Task 5: Structural Relations Audit

• Reification Analysis: How are social relations (labor/capital, creditor/debtor) presented as natural objects or autonomous forces?
• Social Amnesia Analysis: What histories of struggle, alternative arrangements, or collective victories are actively erased?
• False Separation Analysis: How are structural problems (unemployment, precarity, "economic anxiety") reduced to individual psychology or personal responsibility?

The output is transformative and interventionist and it requires counter-discourse, explicit naming of beneficiaries, and recovery of suppressed histories. The tone is confrontational, the stance activist. Endpoint: Dismantling mystification to enable organizing and structural change.

The theoretical difference #

The Interventionist prompt aims to operationalize the insight that "the private interest is already a socially determined interest" (Critical Theory). It treats the boundary between individual and society as ideologically constructed rather than natural. This enables analysis of how texts:

• Transform changeable social structures into inevitable "things" (reification)
• Suppress historical memory to preserve the status quo (social amnesia)
• Privatize collective problems as personal failings (false individualization)

This isn't "adding politics" to linguistics rather it is operating from a tradition that recognizes that all discourse analysis already embeds political commitments. The question is whether those commitments remain tacit or are made explicit and accountable.

About the outputs #

Each analysis examines how linguistic choices construct social reality by distributing agency, naturalizing ideologies, and positioning participants within power relations.

Output structure (Interventionist version):

• Tasks 1-3: Agency, lexical choice, positioning (30 micro-analyses)
• Task 4: 3-5 discourse strategies synthesizing patterns
• Task 5: 8-10 structural analyses (reification, amnesia, false separation)
• Synthesis: Critical observations + 4-5 paragraph conclusion with counter-discourse

Outputs range from 8,000-12,000 words depending on text complexity.

Extended Processing Summaries #

Some outputs include an "Extended Processing Summary" section representing the model's intermediate token generation before producing the final analysis. I include these selectively when they're diagnostically interesting and reveal where the prompt succeeded or failed to constrain generation. These summaries are computational artifacts that help assess prompt effectiveness, not evidence of cognition. The first-person presentation ("I noticed...") is itself a framing choice that anthropomorphizes statistical pattern matching. See the ~About page~ for why I preserve this formatting while rejecting the frame.

The stakes #

Can structured prompts produce meaningfully different analyses based on persona and constraints? Who knows? Some of the outputs are good reads. The "same" text analyzed through different frameworks yields different truths. There’s some recognition that all frameworks are partial, and the question is whose interests does this partiality serve? The Interventionist prompt makes its commitments explicit: it centers those harmed by mystification, recovers suppressed histories, and demands imagination of alternatives. It treats neutrality as a stance that, by default, reproduces existing power. The Softer prompt maintains scholarly distance which is also a political choice, just one less willing to say so. Both aim to at least perform some rigor and both are honest about their methods and explore whether analysis should stop at understanding or continue toward transformation.

Let me know what you think,T

Discourse Depot © 2025 by TD is licensed under ~CC BY-NC-SA 4.0~

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